A large part of SEO is about coding the page properly in the first place. While knowing the right strategies for link building and social media sharing and everything else that gets lumped together under SEO may not be too important for you as a designer to know, the 'on-page' techniques are essential. Fortunately, if you follow best practice for web design in general then you will be hitting most of the right buttons.

I also think it's probably a good idea to get a small amount of practise at some basic seo. Perhaps try to improve the ranking of a couple of pages. Doing this will introduce you to the basics in a practical sense. For example, if you're going to be doing some of your sites using JavaScript, Google isn't going to pick up the content shown by the JS. Getting yourself a little absorbed a little into the seo world will give you awareness of issues like this.

If you're going to be working freelance or for a consultancy, the chances are at some point someone is going to ask you about seo - it'll be good to at least have a basic grounding when that happens. Also if you're ever in a position where you're working with / helping to hire an seo specialist a little working knowledge will help you distinguish between the good seo's (of which their are plenty) and the bad snake oil salesmen (of which there are plenty).

It's important for a developer to know about SEO, but it's not something I would worry about early on if you're still learning. A large business may hire a PR firm to develop SEO strategies, but it's still down to the developer to understand and implement them. In a smaller business, or when freelancing, you may be expected to handle all of it, so in those situations it is essential that you've spent some time learning about SEO.

No, It's not necessary for a web designer to know SEO. SEO and web designing are completely different. Only task of web designer is to design excellent designs in order to attract more customers.

It is not compulsory to know SEO within web design but if you know it then it will become beneficial for you to easily design seo friendly web design because nowadays many people are prefer to design their websites for promotion purposes and to increase their organization/brand popularity in the market that SEO is doing in well way hence as per that basic knowledge especially onpage SEO is an additional advantage to easily design seo friendly web design as well as for web design career.

No, It's not necessary for a web designer to know SEO. SEO and web designing are completely different. Only task of web designer is to design excellent designs in order to attract more customers.

I think it's an important asset to know. With the new Google Penguin 2.0 SEO should be implemented straight into the design instead of doing this when the design is finished. It never hurts to have more knowledge how the search engines works. And because of Penguin the design is essential for SEO purposes

SEOs rely on data. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to dissect search engine algorithm updates and determine the best course of action. So learn to trust data. And learn to trust your SEO counterpart. SEOs don’t want to ruin good design… we just want to be sure that people find it! So don’t fear data… absorb it and learn from it. It will help you to refine your design and usability to keep visitors on your site longer and reaching your common goal of conversion.

you should know bit SEO because in the latest trends of web 3.0 and HTML5 you must be aware of all the tags which are helpful to put them to optimize your website good in Google SERP's , if you want to learn a bit about SEO then go for the Google E book of SEO its a good resource to understand.

jasonfoster said:

I'm gonna be an web designer and developer. But I could not find any reason to know SEO tactics but not sure. Can anyone please help me to determine on my thought? Please, help.

Take a step back and look at what the client wants. he/she/they will want it to be SEO ready and they more than often assume that this is just included. If you can show, and implement this into the work then its an extra service you provide. Could lead to a lot more work. Besides once you get your head around SEO its generally simple to structure your code in a way that you can duplicate this if needed. (i dont mean copy and paste)

It is not necessary that web designers should know SEO, they need assistance of an SEO expert to manage the font and its size according to the On-page activities to be carried out while coding a website. A designer mere has to create a layout/design of a website. He has nothing to do with the Optimization part.

It is not necessary that web designers should know SEO, they need assistance of an SEO expert to manage the font and its size according to the On-page activities to be carried out while coding a website. A designer mere has to create a layout/design of a website. He has nothing to do with the Optimization part.

I'm not sure how font and size is supposed to have any bearing on SEO...

But I think you're taking too narrow a definition of "web designer" ... it's the title a lot of people use, particularly if they do the majority of the work putting a website together, and it often goes a long way past the visual "design" ... it's very common for people who give themselves the title of "web designer" to work on the content writing, back-end code, process architecture and anything else that needs doing, and if that's the scope that people have then they should be including basic on-page SEO in their repertoire as well.

On the other hand, if they just do the visuals then that's a different story.